LePaul

Interesting...we're seeing that the PVA is trying to prime off the side of the bed? How could that be fixed?

Screwhead is inside, thanks for that reminder. It always makes that un-nerving SNAP when you open the feeder. I think I have narrowed it down a bit more. When feeding filament in, it doesn't seem to always hit the hole in the level to glide into the bowden. It definitely takes some finesse to get through there but it seems like more than usual. With the cover off, we can see how it should work. With the cover on (tension screw under the cover), we tension it to the middle position, per the service manual. This last time, we loaded PVA and heard a SNAP sound, and it broke the PVA in the tube. There was a few inch gap between the two segments, so we used the Move process to push them together. Side note, is there a way for the PVA extruder to do the prime blob as the primary one does at start of print (we checked that on in Cura) I know we can do a prime tower but that's overkill.

I've been working with Erin over to support on this. To update, I've done some cold pulls on the BB hot end and the first one had a lot of PVA stuck to it. The second came out clean. I reloading the PVA and it was trickling out of the hot end. This morning I had a student start a print with support and nothing is coming out the PVA side. Still working through some ideas.

Same here. But that’s the issue. Pushing the filament into the extruder isn’t smooth. There’s something about how it’s connecting to the bowden tube that seems problematic. It can take several shoves to finally get it in there. But that leads to the failure and grinding Only using new PVA that came with it

Well, as soon as I had it back together, it's a struggle to get that filament to slide into the extruder. Back to where I started

I think one thing I found is the collet piece holding the bowden into the extruder has some play. So there may be some misalignment there causing friction. I just put it together again but left a bit of filament in the extruder as a guide to getting the collet/bowden to align/fit right. I cleaned out some more debris before putting it all back. More testing

One has only tried PVA that came with the printer. It's working now....but we had to play the "move material" game to get material to flow. Not the normal process. Again, only new filament...what came with it and the 40 rolls of UM filament from PrintedSolid. Picture coming

After several months of lobbying, I was able to finally purchase Ultimaker S5 printers for the workplace. Now, it's one problem after another. This wasn't the trouble free printing experience I had envisioned. We received these printers a few weeks ago and just started doing basic test prints, to tech the students. Printer One keeps having an issue grinding into the PVA material. Or not feeding at all. We frequently have to manually "move" material for the prints to print with material. The feeder tension is set to the middle position and I'm still seeing these grinding issues. Printer Two is even worse. Feeding filament into extruder two is nearly impossible. Filament doesn't smoothly pass through. It takes a few pushes to get it into the Bowden, which just leads to a ground up filament segment if we attempt to move the material or print. I've had the extruder cover off, referred to the manual and I have 6+ years of experience with Ultimaker UMO/2/2+ printers. I don't know what's messing up that extruder but it's clean, no debris...and just not right. I know PVA is tricky and brittle, but no matter how much we change the tensioner, it's grinding and again, that feed from extruder to bowden seems compromised. I've reached out to Support and hopeful they can offer some advice I haven't thought of. Have others had issues with their feeders? I thought I would inquire with the community while awaiting a response. I spend a lot of effort promoting the ease of use of Ultimaker at work. Now...I'm pretty red faced.

I did a ton of things to my Ultimaker Original but on my personal Ultimaker 2+ and my work Ultimaker S5's...I have left them alone. Asides some SD card holders and a guide pulley for the filament path of my 2+, they are stock. I'm printing some Core holders for the S5's I setup last week and perhaps have the students find some novel USB holders to print.

I did in the first post 🙂

Not to mention the Hemera is 1.75mm (The Hemera does have a Bowden option, btw) It's an interesting design and I bought two for upgrading my CR-10S and FT-6. E3D's mounting method leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the mounts I have seen for the CR-10 style printers only screw into 3 locations. There isn't a lot of depth in the provided mounting holes, too My UM2+ is my tank and I would love to bring it up to date with better drivers, feeder and hot end.

Is there a higher res picture available? Trying to see the defects you mention

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to order the spring steel/flexplate from PS and give that a go I've tried the glass in the freezer bit in the past. Fun for hobby use, not entirely practical for the amount of printing these machines will do in a laboratory.

Using Ultimaker Tough PLA, we let them cool for a few hours and they are stuck on there super good. On my home printers, I don't print as close to the glass as the S5 does (7 printers at home)

Hello My workplace recently purchased two Ultimaker S5's and we are noticing that it's quite tough to get prints off the glass bed. (Kudos to the active leveling!) I noticed PrintedSolid sells the magnetic flexplate system for the S5. I recently bought one for my 2+ but been too busy to even unbox it! Has anyone used it on the S5? Thoughts? https://www.printedsolid.com/products/flexplate-system-for-ultimaker-s5